Nasrallah insists Sunday attack was successful, forced Israelis to flee border

Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah takes credit for what he calls a successful operation in Sunday’s missile attack on IDF positions, despite the failure to cause Israeli casualties.

“Despite all the preparations and fake targets the enemy scattered along the border, we waited for our target and when it came, we hit it, without any doubt,” he says of the missile fire that struck an IDF vehicle and an army post at Avivim.

In a speech to mark a Shiite religious festival, he says Hezbollah will no longer think twice about attacking Israeli UAVs in Lebanon. “There are no more red lines,” he says.

He urges his followers not to view the Sunday attack as underwhelming, saying its importance was in the psychological effect it imposed on the Israelis.

“The entire border was evacuated, you couldn’t see a single soldier on the border, nor any of the tractors we saw for a time. Second, they evacuated all their forward command posts. They emptied entire bases, like Avivim, a complete evacuation. A reporter from one channel walked around there and showed how everything was empty, there was no one. Entire outposts were emptied, some of them deep inside [Israeli territory].”

He mocks Israel’s response: “Israel, which responds to every grenade or action, did everything it could to contain the incident, and most of the fire it directed [toward Lebanon in response to the Hezbollah attack] was at defensive targets, not offensive ones.”

He calls Sunday’s operation “a reflection of boldness, bravery, precision and responsibility.”